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Old 08-17-2009, 08:11 PM   #58 (permalink)
cardboard adolescent
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Join Date: Nov 2005
Location: CA
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Ummm... can you really have Heaven right now? You speak of claiming greatness and success, but what is success? Success is making a lot of money? Success is being the best at playing some game that doesn't really mean anything? Is Heaven the state in which you have a lot of money and can buy whatever you want? What exactly is there that you can buy that puts you in Heaven? You say you wouldn't give money to someone who needs it you would rather give it to someone who will use it wisely. So... using the money to buy food isn't wise, but giving the money to someone who will use it to make profitable investments is? The reason we're in an economic crisis in the first place is because our economic system encourages selfish behavior, and as soon as you have a system that treats all people as though they were little robots that will buy only in their own self-interest, it becomes true, and their selfishness will often extend beyond the legal bounds of the system. IE, you get lots of corruption and the class divide widens and widens. Egotism isn't the best thing for everyone, it's the best thing for 1% of the country who have 50% of the wealth. And at the same time, are these people even truly happy? Most of them are completely obsessed with their work and don't even get the satisfaction out of their money that the rest of us crave. The best thing is always caring about the WHOLE, the results simply aren't as immediate. Ultimately though, the success of the whole is the only thing that brings true satisfaction.

So... what you know is that "you know?" Hm. That doesn't seem circular at all. What I take that to mean is that you trust the immediacy of your senses, and that you don't see any need to go beyond them. And yet, you do all the time. Abstraction, that wonderful thing called Reason that you keep whipping out, is a process of going beyond your senses to arrive at Universals. Some people simply take this process of Abstraction further than logical positivists are willing to, arriving at metaphysical ideas which have a history just as profound and coherent as that of science.

The benefit to believing that we all share an eternal soul is that it gives us all a common goal, it connects us to each other, it lets us see through the bullshit that keeps us separated, it gives us the incentive to care for the planet and for all the life it contains, and it gives us a true sense of what it means to affirm life and to love.

As for the question 'what is too big of an ego,' an ego gets too big when it becomes obsessed with control... when it wants everything to function according to its will and wants to turn other egos into its property. This can only lead to dissatisfaction, since it ignores the fact that other egos are also ego... that no ego is really better than any other, only more self-obsessed.
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